


Oranges and Lemons

by Toft



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-12
Updated: 2012-02-12
Packaged: 2017-10-31 00:14:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toft/pseuds/Toft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hathaway's in love, and it isn't safe at all. (Surprise pairing, hence my lack of tags, but if you're concerned about warnings, see my notes)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oranges and Lemons

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to J, for the idea and the title, and Thingswithwings, for the encouragement, and Lewis fandom, for being wonderful.
> 
> Written for the Lewis Week of Love challenge "Impersonal loves" (http://lewis-challenge.livejournal.com/21647.html).
> 
> For detailed warnings, see my dreamwidth post - http://toft.dreamwidth.org/656117.html

Lewis has spent the morning with the ballistics expert from London, going over the evidence from the Dorren case. When he walks past James in the office, the smell of metal clings to him, and James raises his head to follow it, helpless, nostrils flaring.

His want - his _need_ \- is getting increasingly difficult to hide.

He fantasizes about telling Lewis sometimes. _Sir, I wasn't entirely honest with you about the reasons I left the seminary._ For some reason, he feels like Lewis might understand, that his forgiveness would bring benediction. The reason he doesn't is that he knows that this compulsion isn't based in any evidence, or even in hope - just in Lewis' talent for listening. It's why criminals fall over themselves to confess to him in the interrogation room. He'd never forgive James for saying so, but he'd have made a better priest than James.

*

On his rare Wednesday evenings off - he has Sundays for rehearsal, and he didn't want to push his luck, couldn't risk it, not for this - Hathaway stands in a shadowed corner below the walls of Merton college. Above him, the bells ring out in evening practice. Their sound is almost unbearably loud here, so close, and as the student ringers improve through the year the jangling discordancy resolves into occasional patterns, sudden moments of ordered harmony like the sun showing through a cloud that send shivers down his spine. Eight thirty, or slightly later, they ring their last round. On cold evenings, James imagines steam rising from the ringers, the ropes friction-warm, the metal humming. He lights a cigarette and inhales, letting the nicotine settle the butterflies in his stomach. He waits.

*

He's been in love before. He's thirty-three years old. It shouldn't feel the way it does, dizzying, leaving him lightheaded and ashamed and wanting, wanting, wanting. By the time he realizes that it's become an obsession, the want has become part of him, grown its roots into his guts, its tendrils feathering through his limbs. He finds himself hastily minimizing windows on his browser when Lewis walks in unannounced. He's not fast enough to escape his Inspector's eye, of course, or his raised eyebrow. He manages not to shift in his chair. He long-since learned how to conceal arousal.

"Looking at something you shouldn't, Sergeant?"

He manages a smirk. The best defense is a good offense. "Bellringing. Nothing you'd be interested in, Sir."

Lewis sniffs, and passes him the folder. "Since you've got so much time on your hands, you can write up these bloody forms for me."

A cold shiver runs down his spine. It's a reprieve, not an escape, and there've been too many close calls. He feels like a cat on its ninth life; his actions are increasingly feeling beyond his control, and since Will's death his days have been marked by the feeling of time running out.

*

The death of the rector of St. Mary's is a turning point. In the old cloisters, Lewis runs a length of old rope through his hands - not the actual murder weapon, of course, or even the coil it had been cut from, but a sample they'd recovered from a storage locker.

"They went electric in 1993," Dr. Hobson's saying. "All this has just been lying around since then. Didn't want to throw it away, I suppose. It's a dying art, bellringing. People are surprisingly sentimental about it." 

"I dunno, it's a bit thick," Lewis says dubiously. 

"Still perfectly possible to strangle a man with it," Hobson says. "Do you doubt me?"

Lewis holds up the rope and, before James can look away, loops it around his own neck and tugs. Hathaway's breath catches, only partly in sympathy. The great, dusty coil, stretched from years of bearing two tons of swinging iron, is so thick that Lewis has to grip it two-handed.

"Thorley was six foot two," Hobson remarks.

Lewis hands the rope over to Hathaway. "Do the honours then, lad."

With a sense of plunging inevitability, Hathaway wraps the rope around his own throat. It's still warm. It smells of iron, and scratches the sensitive hollow at the base of his throat and the webs of his fingers, presses against his adam's apple until he sees spots. 

"That's enough," Hobson says sharply, and Hathaway looses the rope, suppressing a gasp. He can't meet Lewis' eyes. He mumbles something about getting some air. It takes him ten minutes in the freezing graveyard to pull himself together.

*

That Wednesday, he sits in the library anteroom as they practice. If the noise was loud outside, in here it's deafening. It fills him up until even his bones are vibrating, until his breath catches at every arhythmic stumble, until the sound is transmuted into almost pain, and he thinks it will be enough to purge him through and through, burn this want out of him and leave him pure. It isn't. At the last peal, he stumbles out and locks himself into a stall in the men's bathroom. He fumbles open his trousers and wraps his hand around himself, biting his other wrist to keep quiet as he pulls on his cock with his freezing hand, shame and heat and wet pulsing, spilling out of him. He can't stop. 

After, he thinks nonsensically to give thanks that it's not actually a church, having been deconsecrated in 1971. As if that makes his sin any less.

*

"Jim."

Lewis' eyes are shadowed - it's late, past nine, and most of the office is dark - but James can see the worry in them. He meets them blankly, and Lewis' flinch sparks a feeling in him that's almost satisfaction. He should be afraid. James is.

"Jim -" he says again, and Hathaway drops his gaze.

"Go home," he says. He looks at his computer keyboard until he hears Lewis walk away.

*

He goes over the wall in the dead of night. The library is open at all hours, and the belltower isn't alarmed; it isn't hard to get in. In the old nave, the bells are an old, forbidding presence high above. He's so tense that he feels as if the air itself is vibrating, feels the silence almost as loud as if they were pealing. Up until even the 1960s, church bells were used to give warning to the surrounding countryside in case of flood or fire; this feels like both, a riot in his blood. He mounts the stairs, his breath like smoke before him.

He doesn't use a light; it feels wrong, somehow, disrespectful, not to mention the risk of being seen, and he's taking risk enough already, stupid, so stupid. There's a full moon outside, and it gives light enough. Shivers are wracking him by now, terror and want and elation at his own daring. He's now eighty feet up, and can feel the air below his feet, hear skitters and whispers in the echoes that drift up into the tower. He's on the beam that spans the tower, a foot wide and strong enough to hold several men. He picks his way carefully along it. 

Being in their presence is a relief so strong that his knees go suddenly, dangerously weak. They hang above him, enormous. The sound they make is loud enough to kill a man, this close. It ruptures the blood vessels in the brain, causing a fatal aneurism within minutes. James, whose heart has always stopped for music, feels his closeness to death, and shudders, not with fear. He reaches up, slowly, tentatively, and brushes his finger tip along the lip of the nearest, the tenor fourth. It's cold and smooth; a metallic note flutters down his spine. He reaches out and up, more daring, and runs his fingertips over the clapper, the tender nub in the heart of the bell. His heart is pounding a ring of changes, his cock hard and heavy in his jeans.

"Hello," he whispers, foolish with love. _Hello,_ they whisper back. He knows, then, that he'll come back, again and again, and then it will only be a matter of time.

*

At home, safe in bed, having shoved his black sweater and jeans in the washing machine to get off the incriminating dust, having disposed of the gloves he'd used for the door handles and having switched off the music he'd left on for an alibi, he breathes easy, sleeps. He dreams of swinging, swinging, harsh rope around his wrists, throat and thighs, cold metal against his naked skin; he is inside the bell, and pounded by rigid iron again and again at the rope's pull. The roar of the bells is around him and in him like the merciless voices of the Old Testament angels, and he tastes the blood trickling from his nose. He is filled, and floating, suspended inside the heart of the noise. He shatters, and everything is white.

*

"I love the bells of Oxford," he'd said. He didn't lie.

  


End

**Author's Note:**

> My apologies to Lincoln College library and belltower, which I have never visited; the Lincoln tower here is almost entirely imagined, based on facts gleaned from the internet. I make no claims for accuracy.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Oranges and Lemons by Toft](https://archiveofourown.org/works/696652) by [fire_juggler](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fire_juggler/pseuds/fire_juggler)
  * [Oranges and Lemons by Toft [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6603514) by [Rhea314 (Rhea)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhea/pseuds/Rhea314)




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